The blackout began in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday, and electricity gradually returned to be “restored to 95%” nationally three hours later.
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Scenes from “chaos”. On Wednesday June 19, Ecuador suffered a general power outage in “national scale” due to network failure. The outage began at 3:17 p.m. (10:17 p.m. in Paris) and the electricity gradually returned to be “restored to 95% (3,500 MW)” at the national level three hours later, said the Minister of Energy, Roberto Luque. The metro was paralyzed, requiring the evacuation of thousands of passengers, sometimes on the tracks, but apparently calmly, according to videos broadcast by media.
“There is a fault in the network which has caused cascading disconnections, so there is no electricity throughout the country”Roberto Luque first announced in the afternoon on X, without giving further explanations. “We are focusing all our efforts on resolving the issue as quickly as possible.”he added.
The government blamed a lack of past investment in dilapidated facilities. It is “a failure of the Milagro Zhoray transmission line [qui] caused a +blackout+ on the national system”specified the minister. “For years there has been a lack of investment in these electricity systems and networks, and today we are suffering the consequences,” he explained.
